a
healthy and thriving colony was offered to her husband, all who knew
her, and many who had never spoken to her, rejoiced at the intelligence.
At the present time, in the far distant country which looks up to her
as a personage of importance, this lady--not less exemplary as wife and
mother than brilliant as a woman of society--takes pleasure in recalling
the days when she was a prisoner in the Temple.

One of the last cases of married life in the Temple, that came before
the public notice, was that of a barrister and his wife who incurred
obloquy and punishment for their brutal conduct to a poor servant girl.
No one would thank the writer for re-publishing the details of that
nauseous illustration of the degradation to which it is possible for a
gentleman and scholar to sink. But, however revolting, the case is not
without interest for the reader who is curious about the social life of
the Temple.

The portion of the Temple in which the old-world family life of the Inns
held out the longest, is a clump of commodious houses lying between the
Middle Temple Garden and Essex Street, Strand. Having their
entrance-doors in Essex Street, these houses are, in fact, as private as
the residences of any London quarter. The noise of the Strand reaches
them, but their occupants are as secure from the impertinent gaze or
unwelcome familiarities of law-students and barristers' clerks, as they
would be if they lived at St. John's Wood. In Essex Street, on the
eastern side, the legal families maintained their ground almost till
yesterday. Fifteen years since the writer of this page used to be
invited to dinners and dances in that street--dinners and dances which
were attended by prosperous gentlefolk from the West End of the town. At
that time he often waltzed in a drawing-room, the windows of which
looked upon the spray of the fountain--at which Ruth Pinch loved to gaze
when its jet resembled a wagoner's whip. How all old and precious things
pass away! The dear old 'wagoner's whip' has been replaced by a pert,
perky squirt that will never stir the heart or brain of a future Ruth.

[1] The scandalous state of Gray's Inn at this period is shown by the
following passage in Dugdale's 'Origines:'--"In 23 Eliz. (30 Jan.) there
was an order made that no laundress, nor women called victuallers,
should thenceforth come into the gentlemen's chambers of this society,
until they were full forty years of age, and not send their
maid-servants,